The present invention relates to image synthesis, and in particular to instruments that use back-projection methods to synthesize images and other outputs.
The present invention derives from a concept that enables more efficient construction of images from a series of measurements than can be achieved by devices based on previous methods. The present invention includes a family of devices based on these methods that are implemented in optical computing architectures.
The devices described herein are part of that family and constitute a set of Synthetic Aperture Radar ("SAR") processors. These devices achieve major improvements over existing optical or digital SAR processors. In particular, far greater resolutions for specific fields of view can be obtained than can be obtained by utilizing existing devices of equivalent size, weight and power consumption For example, a SAR processor in accordance with the present invention may take up no more than one-tenth (1/10) of a cubic foot. Existing digital processors take up about 200 cubic feet, while optical implementations take up over 400 cubic feet.
Furthermore, the optical computing architectures described herein eliminate a computation-intensive step in the image generation process that consumes significant digital computing resources in existing digital image synthesizing devices Existing digital computers would have to perform at the rate of tens of teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) to equal the performance of these processors.